The present invention relates to the field of virtual worlds and more particularly a method and system for assisting a user in searching objects in a virtual world.
Searching for some specific place, event, object, kind of objects in a virtual world is a task that involves arriving in a (possibly) new or unknown region and moving and/or looking around a large area of the region inspecting several places or objects until the user finds what he is looking for. This process is often time consuming and poorly efficient since it implies the inspection of a potentially large number of places and objects that are of minor interest, if any, before the place or object of interest is found.
U.S. 2004/0249809 “METHOD, SYSTEM AND DATA STRUCTURE FOR PERFORMING SEARCHES ON THREE DIMENSIONAL OBJECTS” discloses techniques for searching on three dimensional (3D) objects across large, distributed repositories of 3D models. 3D shapes are created for input to a search system; optionally user-defined similarity criterion is used, and search results are interactively navigated and feedback received for modifying the accuracy of the search results. U.S. 2006/0074834 “METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR 3D OBJECT DETECTION USING LEARNING” discloses a method of 3D object detection which uses a learning procedure for feature selection from a feature set based on an annotated image-volume database, generating a set of selected features. U.S. 2005/0002571 “OBJECT SHAPE EXPLORATION USING TOPOLOGY MATCHING” also discloses a 3D analyzer that returns results which are invariant to rotation of the objects. This feature is useful to search engines for online shopping, where a user seeks goods by designating the general shape of the target. Other prior art involve displaying “items” within a specific category (places, people/groups, etc.), which can further be searched by keywords, however, these predefined set of categories are often too generic and therefore the results returned require additional inspection to find the item(s) of interest. Moreover, this kind of search engines often return results whose position is anywhere within the whole virtual world and do not provide any information about the proximity of each result to the current position of the user.
Current keyword-based search mechanisms are mainly based on some textual object properties, such as “Name” and “Description”. Very often, these properties are left to their default values (e.g., name is something like “New Object” or “New Script” and description is empty) by the object creator, or they are stuffed with lots of keywords to make the item show up in as many search results as possible, causing this type of searches to be almost useless in such cases.
Recently an alternative solution to the problem of searching and finding the desired object has been identified in the practice of “tagging” in virtual worlds. Users assign tags to objects they found interesting in some way and share their tags with each other. However, this solution based on tagging is affected by the problem of “subjectiveness” of tags (i.e., identical objects can be tagged with different tags by different people) and would not provide an acceptable level of accuracy of search results.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a technique which alleviates the above drawbacks of the prior art.